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The secret autonomy project
Years earlier, Travis had quietly started a secret autonomous-vehicle project inside Uber, somewhere around 2012 to 2014. He could see where cars were heading before most people could, and the project grew into Uber's internal autonomy group, ATG. At the time, predictions about self-driving ran far ahead of reality, and the answer to when it would arrive was always next year.
Burning cash while trailing
By the depths of COVID, the core business was producing no cash. The billions in losses were not coming from investments in other projects, because the core itself was burning money. Uber also did not believe it was leading in autonomy. It was trailing, whether behind the whole field or just behind Waymo, and it was nowhere near pole position.
Divesting and recovering
So Uber divested ATG and turned its core businesses into cash-flowing machines. From that point on, almost any metric a person picks is up and to the right.
Why did lockdowns hit rides harder than deliveries?
Rides depend on people moving between places, and lockdowns, remote work, and closed venues removed most of that movement. Food delivery runs the other way, since people stuck at home order meals to the door. Uber's delivery business grew during the pandemic while its mobility trips fell sharply. Taxi and airline demand dropped steeply around the world in spring 2020.
Why do self-driving timelines keep slipping?
Driving is easy in ordinary conditions and hard in rare ones, such as a mattress on the highway or a police officer waving traffic through a red light. A system has to handle these long-tail cases reliably, and each new rare case takes a great deal of data and testing. Google started its self-driving car project in 2009, and Waymo's first public robotaxi service in Phoenix launched in 2018. The Society of Automotive Engineers defines six levels of driving automation, numbered 0 to 5.
How did Uber hand off its self-driving unit?
In December 2020, Uber sold its Advanced Technologies Group to Aurora, a self-driving startup. Uber invested in Aurora as part of the deal and took a stake in the company. Aurora had been founded in 2017 by engineers who came from Google, Tesla, and Uber's own self-driving work.
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